Carbon traders eye new Mozambican stoves

Beaming with pride as she stirs a steaming pot of spinach and nuts, Maria Douca is one of the first in Mozambique’s capital to own an ethanol-fired stove, burning fuel made from locally grown cassava.

Betting that thousands of other city-dwellers will also switch from their charcoal stoves, a multi-national consortium plans to generate carbon credits to sell to greenhouse gas emitters on the other side of the planet.

Under the Cleanstar scheme led by Danish biotech giant Novozymes, Mozambican farmers sell surplus cassava that is converted to ethanol at a new facility near the central port city of Beira.

The fuel is then shipped to Maputo, where Cleanstar sells the stoves. They say they cannot keep up with demand. About 200 stoves were sold in the first month and another 3,000 are on order.

Douca has already bought two stoves despite the US$25 price tag — easily a week’s income for her family of eight.

Simple, clean and compact, the appliance designed by Swedish company Dometic looks rather like a camping stove, but does not produce smoke. For the first time in her life she can cook inside.

“I had problems with my eyes when I was cooking on the ground. My eyes ran, I had asthma problems,” she said.

About 85 percent of Mozambique’s energy comes from wood and charcoal. It is a leading cause of respiratory illness, and studies have shown that primitive cooking stoves kill more people per year — about 2 million — than malaria.

Cleanstar hopes to capture a sizable chunk of Maputo’s US$153 million a year charcoal business. Ethanol sells at roughly the same price as charcoal — which has doubled in the past three years.

Bank of America Merill Lynch has put US$4 million into the project, which will generate carbon credits, based on the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.

The credits can be sold to polluters under trading schemes in places such as the EU or Australia.

“I have seen a dozen different cook stove projects that economically haven’t made sense. This is the first one I’ve seen that is completely integrated,” Bank of America Merill Lynch carbon markets portfolio director Abyd Karmali said. “From an environmental standpoint, it is delivering a very large greenhouse gas emission reduction.”

A move by the EU to accept new carbon credits only from the world’s poorest countries after this year has made countries like Mozambique more attractive to investors.

If successful, its investors believe the Cleanstar model could be replicated across the region.

“The reason this is interesting is the potential to replicate it not only once, but 10,000 times across Africa,” Novozymes president Steen Riisgaard said.

“Every single link in the value chain should make good money for themselves or the whole thing will fall apart. Also a little money for us selling enzymes,” he added.

The company’s enzymes help convert cassava chips into ethanol fuel at the Beira plant, the first of several planned facilities.

Initially hesitant to support the sale of cassava — a basic food for many — Mozambique’s government now embraces the project.

“There is no contradiction between producing for food and producing for agro-industry. Our country is vast,” Mozambique Agriculture Minister Jose Pacheco said.

Despite its fertile soils and favorable climate, Mozambique uses less than one-tenth of its arable land — the lowest land use in southern Africa.